Some of the staff at Broadmoor are trying to
form a museum. Would you like to help? It was a
proposal out of the blue but I jumped at it. I
had lived in Crowthome since 1965 but knew
nothing of our grim neighbour up the hill. The
opportunity to look inside the hospital was too
good to miss, quite apart from my curiosity about
the history of Broadmoor.
At the first meeting, and scarcely daring to
hope for permission, I asked if I might see the
documents. I was taken to a large panelled room
in which assorted crates of paper and books were
piled to a height of about seven feet along a
wall about thirty feet long and to a width of
several feet. It was an untidy heap and it was
immediately obvious that the books near the
bottom and standing on their edges were being
seriously damaged under the weight of several
feet of paper above them. It was also quickly
apparent that many of the documents were of
national significance. The hospital had first
received patients in 1863 and since that time
there had been no record management system and
nothing had been thrown away deliberately but
neither had anything been saved deliberately.
When a cupboard was filled with paper, its door
was locked and another cupboard found. After more
than a hundred years, there were document hoards
in roof spaces, under stairs, in long forgotten
cupboards and unused rooms.
Broadmoor
Old Gate
Somehow during the following meeting of the
Broadmoor History Society, I was given the task
of listing what was in the accumulation. Our
initial aim was a discussion with the Public
Record Office about what should be done. That was
in 1992 and by 1995 the nine tons of paper had
been listed, sorted and archivally boxed on
shelves. More importantly perhaps,
representatives of the Public Record Office had
given their blessing to our progress and plans.
During their first visit, they described the
documents as being ‘a national treasure’
and our own views were vindicated. I think that
we were all surprised by the variety and richness
of what we found; leather bound volumes, oil and
water colour paintings by a nationally famous
artist, early maps of the area, photographs,
files and loose sheets of paper.
Broadmoor was the first custom-built criminal
lunatic asylum in the world. It was originally
conceived as a national establishment but it also
served the empire during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. I found that there were no
precedents for an establishment having both
medical and penal motives for its existence. It
took many trials to find a set of headings under
which to catalogue the almost random assortment
of items which were found. There was a copy of a
Privy Council notice authorising the building of
Broadmoor and signed by Queen Victoria. There
were letters from high ranking Government
officers (sometimes in Australia, India or
Nigeria for example), records of patients and
staff giving extraordinary details of their
lives, journals of Superintendents and
correspondence dealing with civil defence
problems for an asylum in time of war. At the
other end of the scale, there was a tea-chest of
stores chits; scraps of often undated papers
showing perhaps a gas-mantle, a toilet roll or
six dusters and authorised by incomprehensibly
scribbled initials. Another crate contained
failed applications for employment files. The
applications included photographs, security
checks with previous employers and neighbours and
supporting letters of character. A gold-mine for
descendants if they were indexed - but why would
the hospital retain them when the application
failed?
Two major tasks are presently underway: the
creation of finding aids and decisions about
closure periods for different classes of record.
Until such processes are complete there can be no
possibility of general access although this must
be a long term objective for the bulk of the
collection. An index of employees was an early
ambition and is now essentially complete from 1862
to the mid 1920s with patchy coverage
thereafter to about 1950 when
responsibility for Broadmoor was transferred from
the Home Office to the Ministry of Health. This
index already covers salary and wage ledgers and
other classes of record are gradually being added
to it. If anyone knows that they have an ancestor
who was employed at Broadmoor, their pay, title(s),
roles, promotions,
The
Terrace, Broadmoor
misdemeanours and so forth can be easily
provided. Similarly, building alterations,
management structures, policies, the holders of
key posts and the interactions of the
Commissioners in Lunacy, Councils of Supervision,
Boards of Control within Broadmoor are now easily
accessible. A review of legislation impacting on
Broadmoor and forensic psychiatry has been
completed. The responses of the Home Office to
unexpected or unusual demands during two world
wars (including the presence of enemy prisoners
of war and the dropping of a stick of H.E. bombs
across the site) provide interesting sidelines.
The problem of access to patient information
is much more complex and unresolved. Medical
records seem likely to remain closed for ever
except to bona fide medical researchers.
Exceptionally, and subject to medical
counselling, such information may be interpreted
to genuine next-of-kin. As a policy, the hospital
will not engage in any discussion of named
patients with anybody on a routine basis. The
hospital has an indefinitely long duty of care to
its patients and their families, which it takes
very seriously. There is a body of opinion which
considers that criminal lunatic non-medical
records are so sensitive that whereas lunatic or
criminal records are opened after three
generations this is not sufficiently long to
protect the descendants of Broadmoor patients.
Four generations (125 years) has been proposed
informally as a minimum closure period but no
formal consideration has yet taken place.
There have been one or two extraordinary
exceptions where the ethical committee of the
hospital has judged that it is in the interest of
the patient and his or her family to release non-medical
information. One of these led to the publication
of the book The Surgeon of Crowthorne, where
a patient made a contribution to world literature
in spite of his mental illness and his isolation
from the world. Another concerned an
internationally famous painter whose fanciful
pictures have given pleasure to thousands. Their
families are able to feel proud of such relations
as a result of their lives and mental illness
being put into perspective. Another taboo area
concerns security. Access to recent maps, plans
and photographs is restricted to the extent of
being inaccessible to all but a very few members
of staff.
Some of the foregoing, coupled with the rather
secretive image of Broadmoor held by some, ought
not to discourage genuine students having a
reasonable and serious interest in its historic
affairs. A recent enquirer telephoned me recently.
He knew his grandparents’ names but nothing
more and their surnames were so common that
searching for them was likely to be unsuccessful.
Their family papers had been destroyed during the
war and he was at a loss to find a starting point.
He had a number of family folk-memories which
might or might not be true but which were of no
immediate help. He believed that his grandfather
had begun life in Scotland; that he might have
fought in the war (but which one?); that he might
have worked at Broadmoor but had no idea of when.
As we spoke, I looked in our staff index and
because his grandfather’s given names were
somewhat unusual, I found him immediately. By the
end of ten minutes I had given him a date of
birth, the fact that he had fought in the Crimean
war, his date of entry to Broadmoor, his pay and
increments, title, promotions (and one demotion),
date of retirement after an assault. Better
still, I was able to tell him that his
grandparents must have met at Broadmoor because I
found her too. She was a laundry maid and we
found her date of birth and employment details.
She had been obliged to leave Broadmoor when she
married so he could guess at a likely date for
that too. The caller was understandably almost
speechless by the time that we ended the
conversation and he hurried away with the
intention of discovering from the 1881 census
where his two grandparents had been born.
There are at least two other aspects to making
enquiries to a place like Broadmoor, in addition
to the enquirer’s own motives. Firstly,
records become more complete if they are linked
to external events and secondly our efforts to
improve the safety of precious records are
worthless if the records are unused. It gave me
enormous satisfaction both for the hospital and
for myself to unlock a door to the past for the
caller. If anyone knows of an ancestor who worked
at Broadmoor and would like to know more of his
employment there, a letter addressed to me at the
hospital will be answered to the best of our
ability.
